No credit card required

When you first set up your monthly Azure credit, you are not required to provide a credit card. Even if you choose to store a credit card in your account, you automatically start with a $0 spending limit—so there is no risk of any charges, until you’re ready.

Low dev/test rates help you stretch your credit farther

Use the Microsoft software included with your Visual Studio subscription on Azure Virtual Machines for dev/test at no extra charge—you’ll just pay the Linux rate for VMs you run, even VMs with SQL Server, SharePoint Server, or other software that is normally billed at a higher rate. Upload custom virtual machine images yourself or use one of our pre-configured images from the Azure Gallery.

In addition to the low dev/test rates on VMs, you also get low rates on Cloud Services, HDInsight, and Web Apps.

Access to Windows 10

When you set up your monthly Azure credit, you can run Windows 10 images on Azure for dev/test.

What can I buy with my monthly credit?

The choice is yours on how you use your monthly Azure credit. Use the credit toward on almost any Azure service including Virtual Machines, Web Apps, Cloud Services, Mobile Services, Storage, SQL Databases, Content Delivery Network, HDInsight, Media Services, and many more.

Support plans, Application Insights, Visual Studio subscriptions, Visual Studio Team Services, third-party branded products, products sold through Marketplace, and products otherwise sold separately from Azure (for example, Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium) are the only exceptions—you’ll be billed for any of these services used.

Need Azure for your dev team?

While the monthly Azure credit for Visual Studio subscribers is great for your personal dev/test workloads, it isn’t optimal for work you’re doing as a team. Thankfully, we’ve created a couple options for you to get lower dev/test rates, access to Windows 10 for dev/test, along with other advantages:

FAQ

Monthly Azure credits for Visual Studio subscribers are specifically for dev/test usage only. Production workloads must be run on regular Azure subscriptions such as Pay-As-You-Go.

Yes, if your organization uses Azure Active Directory, such as if you are using Office 365. For additional details, see the Using Work Accounts FAQ.

Starting September 8, 2016, free Azure subscriptions created via the Visual Studio Subscriptions benefit may see certain geographies not available for creating new VMs and Azure Services. This will have no impact to service availability.

The monthly Azure credit for Visual Studio subscribers is for development and testing only and is offered at discounted usage rates. These offers do not carry a financially-backed SLA. We reserve the right to suspend any instance (VM or cloud service) that runs continuously for more than 120 hours or if we determine that the instance is being used for production. We are making this capacity available to Visual Studio subscribers on a best efforts basis; there is no guarantee of capacity availability.